ACADEMIA Letters

Two positions on development: Arturo Escobar and Henry

Veltmeyer
Gabriela Salgado, FLACSO Ecuador

For this review, I have chosen to work with the texts “The Invention of Development” by
Arturo Escobar, and “Una sinopsis de la idea de desarrollo” by Henry Veltmeyer.
Escobar’s text acts as an appropriate introduction to the development, or a historical ac-
count of how the idea of development was created as the solution to the problems of the
postcolonial world, and its subsequent failure to achieve the goals it had set for itself. In this
account, Escobar tells us about the beginnings of this notion of development in the global
north in the postwar period, when it was found that � of the population lived in poverty (ac-
cording to the World Bank, those who had an annual per capita income of less than $100; as
a result, 70% of the world’s population was, indeed, poor), and it was decided that the way to
solve this problem, logically, was to boost economic growth.
Escobar illustrates how, under these ideals of economic growth, a discourse was created
that favored modernity and its manifestations (industrialization, urbanization, and capital in-
vestment) as the only solutions to the problem of development. To reinforce it, national and
international institutions and entire systems were created to fight poverty. Also, the creation
of knowledge around development meant the emergence of an industry in which it became
professionalized, with study and research disciplines that effectively manage to place develop-
ment not within the political or social sphere, but within the relative neutrality of the scientific.
The main message of Escobar’s text is that development has never been conceived with
people and their cultures in mind, but as a general solution that could be applied in all contexts,
created by these new development technicians to eliminate all instances of poverty that exist
in the world. According to the author, the development represents a system in which ideas of
ethnocentrism and oppression are perpetuated from the countries of the global north, which,
through these ideas, seek to regenerate the inhabitants of the south and infuse them with their

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Gabriela Salgado, gasalgadofl@flacso.edu.ec

Citation: Salgado, G. (2021). Two positions on development: Arturo Escobar and Henry Veltmeyer. Academia
Letters, Article 2377. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2377.

1
(”better”) western values in order to stop them from living precariously. Development must
adapt to cultures and conditions and from there, offer solutions to problems, not the other way
around.
Henry Veltmeyer offers a more historical view on development, and recounts the evolution
of thought, from a capitalist root. For him, development can be seen as various strategies to
achieve an end (in this case, the eradication of poverty), or as a system based on objectives that
must be applied. From these strategies, one can think of development as an evolution of con-
cepts originating from the ideals of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment era, with a
humanistic approach, of liberating human beings from oppression. Capitalism is then thought
of as the way in which economic growth (which Escobar also speaks of) can be achieved; it
later became growth with equity, and from the eighties onward, freedom from poverty was
represented in neoliberalism. As a system, development revolves around three meta-theories:
transforming society towards industrialization, modifying the values of society in favor of
possessive individualism, and capitalist development. Within this scheme, the elimination of
the peasantry is also proposed, and its subsequent transformation into either a proletariat that
sells its workforce for a salary or en masse of capitalist entrepreneurs, through the industrial-
ization and modernization of the agricultural sector.
Although each text has been written from a different theoretical approach —Escobar
writes from poststructuralism and Veltmeyer from the Marxist tradition, they are complemen-
tary and should be analyzed together. Veltmeyer analyzes several of the ideas that Escobar
outlines and breaks them down to offer a more complete vision of the same line of thought:
development consists of implanting the western economic and social values represented in
modernity: industrialization and economic growth. The consequences of the implementation
of these strategies or systems are potentially the destruction of traditional ways of life in favor
of capital and in a certain way the demonization of the peasantry as an unproductive, surplus,
and unprepared workforce, living anachronistic ways of life that they do not fit with modern
ideals of prosperity.
Escobar speaks in a very concrete way about the evil that development has caused in the
populations of the global south, but he does not delve into the mechanisms that cause harm
to people, but rather gives a very general explanation of this. Veltmeyer, on the other hand,
explains the strategies in more detail and emphasizes the role of capitalism as responsible for
the diffusion of these ideas and their imposition on the “developing” world, but does not delve
into the consequences indicated by Escobar. However, both texts are relevant to understand
the development not as a process made to improve people’s lives but as a discourse that takes
them little into account and generates many more results in the world that creates it, than in
the one it tries to change.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Gabriela Salgado, gasalgadofl@flacso.edu.ec

Citation: Salgado, G. (2021). Two positions on development: Arturo Escobar and Henry Veltmeyer. Academia
Letters, Article 2377. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2377.

2
References
Escobar, Arturo. “The Invention of Development.” Current History 98 no. 631 (1999):
382-87.

Veltmeyer, Henry. “Una Sinopsis De La Idea De Desarrollo.” Migración Y Desarrollo 08,

no. 14 (2010): 9-34.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Gabriela Salgado, gasalgadofl@flacso.edu.ec

Citation: Salgado, G. (2021). Two positions on development: Arturo Escobar and Henry Veltmeyer. Academia
Letters, Article 2377. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2377.